However, regardless of the popularity of any sport, anybody knows the true icons of the game, and Colin McRae is exactly that. The record-breaking winner of 25 rallies had this series bear his name from the late 90's right up to the Dirt rebrand in 2008, a year after he tragically died in a helicopter accident.
It's only fitting that this DLC pays homage to a sporting great, and this will make you feel like you're the man himself - Mainly for the fact it'll push your skills to limits of near perfectionism.
The package is built up of a series of 40 different scenarios spread across a timeline, focusing on significant events that occurred throughout Colin McRae's rally career. They're further divided into 4 time periods - Early Years (1984 - 1989), Rising Star (1991 - 1994), World Champion (1995 - 1998) and A New Challenge (1999 - 2006).
The concept is simple enough. Progress through each time period, completing enough scenarios to unlock the next time period. You'll only need to complete 3 in each era to unlock the next - The trophies and their requirements are a completely different story though.
The scenarios are varied, and range from beating a teammate, to winning a stage whilst having damage to a specific part of the car, to averaging a certain speed throughout the completion of a stage. You'll also get to drive a range of different vehicles the great man himself has driven. The Subaru Legacy RS and Subaru Impreza S4 debut, as well as Scotland and all it's routes. It's probably a bit disingenuous to suggest it's by far the best Dirt Rally DLC pack, because the others have had nowhere near the same level of depth to them, but that doesn't take away from it's brilliance.
It'll no doubt please true fans of the sport. The scenarios are well recreated and the authenticity is all there - but if you're in it for the trophies, a gruelling challenge awaits.
Speaking of which, there are 5 new trophies added to the game as part of this package, and the centric focus is on the scenarios, despite the fact there is a little bit of extra-curricular inclusion outside of these.
There's a hint of natural progression, as completing the 1995 Wales scenario will net you a trophy, and a little bit of wackiness as rolling your Subaru Legacy RS in Finland 3 times in one stage will also reward you with a trophy. I do have to admit, there was a way more cathartic feeling than would have normally been reasonable upon doing this post-completion of beating every scenario on the toughest difficulty level, which is where the main prize lies;
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| ...Flatout - Complete every scenario on very hard difficulty. |
The "...Flatout" trophy, awarded for Completing every scenario on very hard difficulty is a brutal challenge. It's one of the toughest I've experienced in any game, especially within the racing genre, which has seen me beat the Motorstorm : Pacific Rift and Crash Team Racing time trials.
It requires you to beat all 40 scenarios on "very hard" difficulty. Dirt Rally 2.0 operates it's difficulty on a sliding scale basis, where the lowest possible choice to set the game to this difficulty requires the slider to be sat on at least 91 or above, up to 100. There has never been a necessity from the trophy list to unlock any trophies on a specific difficulty setting up to this point, so this was a completely new experience for me. I knew I'd need every slight advantage I could get, so 91 it was and not a notch further.
Getting through the early stages didn't feel too bad. I won't go as far to suggest it was luring me into a false sense of security, but it was going alarmingly too smoothly to at least make me cautious. The Early Years era only has 5 scenarios, and it very much acts as an introduction to the mode. However, so far, so good.
The Rising Star era is where things begin to heat up a little bit. The amount of scenarios just over doubles and you begin to experience the more gruelling multi-stage events that end up being the notch up in difficulty that runs a concurrent theme throughout. Within this era though, they're limited to a maximum of 3 stages and only 3 of the 11 total scenarios are multi-stage events, so it's still not too bad. If you're seasoned with Dirt Rally 2.0, you'll be fine, and this era just acts as a way of getting familiar with the slow rise in challenge.
World Champion era is where this trophy truly comes to fruition though. The number of scenarios yet again expands, with 13 in total within this category, and the multi-stage events are bigger and more frequent. A total of 8 out of the 13 scenarios are multi-stage events, and 7 of these contain either 4 or 5 stages to beat a scenario. These are lengthy and will begin to challenge you in every way.
Mastering each of the routes, perfecting your times - Sometimes by hundreds of seconds - and understanding vehicle handling all become necessary to success. Some of the scenario requirements will expect you to win by a considerable cumulative margin, and this can only be achieved with an almost perfect run for every stage where you stretch a lead. Some of these stages are 7 or 8 minutes long and I lost count of the amount of times I lost concentration on the final leg, causing a reset in progress back to the start. On other occasions, I'd beaten the stage, but wasn't comfortable with the time - and this could sometimes be a matter of half a second or so, such is the demanding nature of this difficulty level.
It doesn't matter how good you get at a game, a mental lapse can happen to anyone, and playing on very hard difficulty does not allow for any margin for error. It also means you have to take way more risks if you fall behind on par times and have to catch up. This is also naturally perilous and resulted in crashes multiple times.
It was also at this point where I discovered something strange that works against you. During certain multi-stage scenarios, if you quit part-way through, which is something I did frequently when I'd given up for the day and needed a break, then resuming from where you left off would give the AI a quicker completion time for the stage you started back at. Due to how difficult some of these scenarios are, this is something that didn't seem unusual, or out of the ordinary and I spent alot of time presuming the AI was beating me up, rather than noticing an obvious glitch had occurred. It's apparently common knowledge, and you can only remedy it by beating multi-stage scenarios without pausing for a break in-between. Frustrating, because it meant I had to set aside entire days at times just to beat a single multi-stage scenario. Thankfully, this doesn't occur on all of them, but an annoying discovery nonetheless.
Slowly I was chipping away though, and the New Challenge era is where this trophy somewhat plateaus. It still contained more of the same punishing multi-stage events, but bought something new to the table too. This final era introduces a couple of challenges where you have to average a certain speed throughout an entire stage, adding a shedload of calculated risk as you sacrifice prowess for power in the name of ensuring you maintain your speed whilst avoiding catastrophe - another new skill I had to perfect myself on, and took a while to do so.
My average progress would be 1 scenario beaten per session, which could easily be 6-8 hours at times. These 4-5 multi-stage events exist to test your ability and perseverance. Small steps of progress like that began to feel like mammoth victories, and the odd scenario would pop up that I could do within a couple of tries, which absolutely spurred me on.
It's crushing difficulty had me equally frustrated but hooked for more simultaneously. I've always believed there's a difference between the types of trial and error a game can put you through, and if you're failing but noticing progress, this becomes crucial to pushing through.
Beating that final scenario was a big relief. I'd originally looked up a trophy guide that had suggested this package to be within the region of 100 hours for completion, which I was very skeptical over initially. This probably took me even longer on the basis of how much time I'd spent battling through some of these scenarios.
There is also a stackable trophy, awarded for just completing every scenario, which will suit most people. However, this particular trophy is brutal and is not aimed at the casual player. You will need to be prepared to be very good to earn this, and it makes no compromise on that.
There was a final trophy still to grab, awarded for Setting a time of under 7 minutes on Newbridge House in the Subaru Impreza S4, which only took me a couple of attempts. I honestly felt like this was a breeze purely for the fact I'd practised so hard on the above trophy, everything else after this felt insignificant in comparison - A great benchmark for how well I'd honed my skills.
It wasn't a challenge I saw coming, especially based on what the Platinum trophy and it's subsequent DLC packs had thrown up thus far, but you know what they say - If you want to be the best, you've got to beat the best, and that's what Colin McRae was.
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